Welcome to a long, involved story about how a hat went through many design permutations before it finally became a lovely thing that I enjoy wearing! I originally (all the way back in April 2017…) started out wanting to make this Lily Elsie mushroom hat to wear with my Miss Muffet dress: I began with a fairly generic straw sunhat I’d found at an op shop. I soaked it and re-shaped it over a hat-block and towels to get that mushroom shape. Somewhere there are photos of the process, but I just can’t find them. Update: I have found one of the original re-shaping photos! The curved-up back brim is based on a catalogue image from 1913: And…it looked terrible on me. So it went in the naughty pile. And then I needed a hat to go with the 1918-19 Not Another Blue Dress, so it came back out, and I re-shaped it again intp a shape halfway between this painting: And the bottom left hat: And then added a dark blue ribbon under the …